


Slipping Out from the End of the World

by aurilly



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Backstory, Book: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 11:07:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8011279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ramandu's daughter waits and waits for fate to come. Unfortunately, fate doesn't do a great job of specifying. Until then, however, she has her own amusements.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slipping Out from the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moonshower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moonshower/gifts).



> This is based on the books, but I'm calling her Lilliandil, as the movie did, since the books never gave her a name.

It had taken years, but Lilliandil learned how to interpret the snores and exhalations of the sleepers. Just as the centaurs in the not-so-childish fables these men feared had learned how to read patterns in the dances of the stars, she listened for stories in the unconscious noises made by the slumberers. Wheezes were hopes dashed, grunts were desires enjoyed, rustling fabric as they shifted conveyed frustrations that chafed. Sometimes they made it easy for her by actually mumbling to themselves. The sounds wove a tapestry of stories as rich as any book (and Lilliandil had read many, unbeknownst to her father).

She learned of the travelers’ homeland, of the tyrant who had forced them into this journey, of their fears and joys and disappointments. The song she and her father sang every morning, and the song with which the oncoming birds responded, was objectively more beautiful, but she felt only regret when the time came every day to drown out the sleepers’ exciting tale. As opposed to a new day, the dawn and its chaotic feeding frenzy brought only an interruption to Lilliandil’s pleasure.

She stroked their growing hair, piled it into nests, trimmed their nails, and ensured their comfort. They may never know who had soothed them, but she did not mind.

* * *

Before setting behind the hill, Aravir sometimes twinkled in response to Lilliandil’s morning song.

This was the most direct response she had ever received to her daily duties.

One day, not so long ago, when she was still only a little girl, and her father a much older man than he would later be, she asked, “Is Aravir my mother?” 

“No. Your mother was a mortal. Surely you have guessed this.”

Lilliandil had, but guessing was not the same as knowing. Despite the knowledge, she continued to look at Aravir as her mother; it was better than the emptiness of the alternative. 

She counted the minutes until her father would go to bed, because as soon as he was asleep, her secret day could begin.

* * *

The labyrinth behind the door in the hillside had many exits. During the lonely days before the sleepers had come to keep her quiet company, she had explored the different pathways, in stark disobedience of her father’s orders.

Most doors led to places that were dark, dull. But there were a few that led elsewhere. Long ago, she had found her favorite.

A room full of books with a light that shone as steady and unwavering as her candle, even though there was no fire. The floor was covered in a soft but dingy-coloured fabric that chafed the skin of her legs when she bent them underneath her. Odd shelves made of roughly cut metal and painted an ugly green color held the countless rows books that she treasured. A covering overhead blocked her view of the sun and stars. A roof, she had learned it was called.

She never saw anyone in the library, and the door leading outside was always shut. But she knew this was a world other than the one in which she usually resided. It smelled different here. Yellow and vibrant and tart, somehow.

She did not know how she could read, for she had never been taught, but the letters danced before her eyes and were more naturally intelligible than even the signs of the constellations.

And in the books were such stories! Of mustachioed detectives, of sculptors whose beloved statues came to life, of princesses whisked away by genies in lamps, of a foolish knight who fought windmills. Day after day, while her father slept, Lilliandil devoured these tales and more, so much so that the characters became the friends she had never had.

“You are looking tired,” her father noted one day. “Have you not been sleeping while I do?”

“My dreams keep me awake,” she answered truthfully. Dreams of a season called autumn and a holiday called Christmas and of hitch-hiking and the blooming of the cherry blossoms in Japan and…

She lived on the most beautiful island in her world, where the stars, her relatives, danced for her instruction and entertainment. Yet every morning she itched to flee to her ugly, dusty library, to the room that existed outside of this world entirely.

If only the door leading out of the library might ever open. She might never return.

* * *

“A ship is coming,” Ramandu told her.

Lilliandil already knew this. For months, the stars had danced of nothing else.

“Shall I welcome them?” she asked. “And how?”

“The how will become apparent. You need only be yourself. One day you will leave with them, with their king.”

“Is this what has been foretold?” Lilliandil asked, mulling over the prospect in her mind, and finding herself projecting visions of characters she had read about onto a shadowy imagined figure walking up the beach.

“It is,” he said. “But more than that, it is what you have wanted all this time, is it not? To leave this old man, your father, and live among other people?”

“You are not so old as you were,” she said, deflecting, because she knew that her departure would merely switch the bounty of loneliness from one body to another, without becoming lesser. Such was the way of things. She felt sorry for him, and also sorry to leave the only real companion she had ever known, but she could not suppress a chill of joyous anticipation. Finally, a story was to happen to her.

* * *

When they came, Lilliandil’s eye immediately fell on the other one, the younger king. She rejoiced at the thought that he, here, was the next chapter of her story. He was less dashing, perhaps, than some of the princes and kings of which she had read. Less dashing and archetypal, in fact, than the king who stood beside him. This youth was shorter and a bit more pimpled. But he was wiser and more seasoned despite his fewer years. Even better, he arrived with a sister, a potential friend, a bonus. 

There was something familiar about Edmund and his jolly-looking sister. Like Lilliandil’s father, they were younger than they had once been, but they still carried the marks of a greater age. Edmund spoke less, feared being taken for a coward (though no one ever would) and his eyes sparkled with guilt when confronted with the knife that had been wielded to save him. Lucy’s eyes sparkled with fun and the same curiosity Lilliandil felt about everything. They were both terribly interesting, like an onion she was hungry to peel.

Moreover, they—and a third companion, too—smelled like the library, like that other place. Yellow and vibrant and tart.

Her suspicions that they hailed from there were confirmed when the other king—Caspian—referred to a tale from another world—from _their_ world. Lilliandil had read that one. Although Caspian was the one to have asked the question, she looked at Edmund as she answered. 

Unfortunately, he was busy looking at the mouse.

* * *

“Tell me about your world,” Lilliandil said to Lucy while the others argued about who might stay and who might travel to the end of the world.

“Surely it is I who ought to ask you,” Lucy replied. “This world is so much more wonderful than anything I could tell you about England.”

“Nay, friend,” Lilliandil said, and thrilled at the word, hoped it was true. Here, alone with this girl, she could relax the formality that she had used earlier, and be herself, or, rather, the person she might like to be, now that there was an audience. “I have long wished for this moment. Tell me the most boring detail you can think of. Something no one would ever think to put in a story.”

They sat up all night, at the top of one of the little hills, looking down at the men and mouse eating and drinking below them. Lucy told Lilliandil of school uniforms and of trains and of the tickles Susan sometimes gave her. She even demonstrated. It was not meant to be a story, but Lilliandil fashioned it into one anyway. She knew enough from her reading to ask the right questions, and even told a joke that made Lucy laugh.

Lilliandil had never been so happy.

“I thought I heard giggling,” a new voice said hours later, when it was closer to dawn. It was Edmund. 

“It’s nice to have another girl around,” Lucy said dreamily, and leaned comfortingly against Lilliandil’s side. “It’s been months, really. I don’t mind sailing with the boys, but…”

“I know. It was like that summer Peter got sent to stay with Uncle Martin, and I had three weeks with just you and Su and Su’s three friends from school.”

“I’ve been telling Lilliandil all about home. She knows more about our world than she has let on, you know.”

“Oh really?” Edmund asked. 

He flopped down onto the grass near them, the smell of wine mingling with the delicious smell he and Lucy and Eustace shared. The toe of his boot pressed into Lilliandil’s hip. She was certain he did not notice and would have apologized had he known, but she said nothing, savoring every moment of the slight discomfort. 

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” he said, when a moment passed and they had not resumed their conversation. “Keep talking.”

They did.

* * *

She smiled again later, when Caspian mentioned wanting to speak with her again. She smiled in response, with a glow meant for Lucy and Edmund. But at that moment, they turned to attend to something Eustace had said, and Caspian standing at their side, was the only one who received the full glow of her longing.

But they would return.

* * *

One of their company stayed. Lilliandil tried to talk to this Pittencream, but he could not muster the confidence to reply. 

After many trials and disappointments, Lilliandil eventually left him eating in the rain and returned to her library. It was strange to learn that not everyone made for good company.

* * *

The stars told her that the ship would soon return. She waited every day on the beach. But when the _Dawn Treader_ pulled into the harbor, Lucy and Edmund were not with the company.

This was a blow for which the stars had failed to prepare her. She had known, of course, that the mouse would remain at the world’s end. Even he had known it, and had hummed the song all while they had stopped at the island the first time. The rules stated that only one had to remain to break the enchantment. She had not expected any further losses.

“And your friends?” she asked Caspian, who drew near. “King Edmund and Queen Lucy? And their cousin?”

Behind her, the lords were stirring, awake after so long. A year ago, when the three sleepers had been her most exciting potential companions, the breaking of the enchantment had been her dearest wish. She would have been agog with excitement. A year ago, she would have thought all she wanted was this moment. But now it had come and she could not even bother to turn and look.

Caspian’s face—a second ago so full of joy at a quest finally accomplished, as well as something warmer, when he looked at her—fell. 

“They have gone, my lady. Aslan has sent them back to their own world again.”

“When will they return?”

He shook his head. “Never.”

That night, they whispered together of their grief. Caspian’s was even greater than her own. He had known them more intimately, had heard the stories she had read from their own lips. She discovered that he longed for their world just as much as she always had.

She had not thought they had much in common, before. She had not thought this one could possibly be the intended king. She had been wrong.

“Tell me about your home,” she said, when for a time they had exhausted their stories about the other world.

His face transformed into something softer, even more handsome and welcoming as he began to speak of his home. “Cair Paravel sits on the sea. The mermaids sing to us in the mornings, and apples grow in the courtyard. There is a—”

“Is there a library?” she interrupted.

“Yes, my lady. A very large one.”

Lilliandil smiled. Perhaps Lucy was right. Perhaps she would grow to like Narnia as well.


End file.
